Metadata Design for Introspection-Capable Reconfigurable Systems

Global vision consensus on the next generation of wireless mobile communications, broadly termed 4G, sketches a hybrid infrastructure, comprising different wireless access systems in a complementary manner and vested with reconfiguration capabilities that facilitate a flexible and dynamic adaptation of the wireless infrastructure to meet the ever-changing service requirements. We identify essential metadata classes to support the reconfiguration of communication systems, introducing a respective objectoriented UML model. We elaborate on the design rationale that underpins the UML model, describing its classes and associations and discussing the possible metadata representation technologies and encoding formats. We proceed to identify existing metadata standards that are candidate for the representation of reconfiguration metadata, discussing and evaluating their suitability. Ultimately, we present a developed reconfiguration metadata description vocabulary and illustrate its application with an example.